Action Figures - Issue Four: Cruel Summer

by Michael C Bailey

  “FREEZE, ALL OF YOU!” I shout. The group does as told and immediately drops to the ground, their hands going up over their heads, while the runner throws himself up against the wall, spread-eagle.

  Huh. That was easy.

  Oh no.

  The man against the wall turns the furious red of molten lava, fresh and hot from the volcano. I hesitate, unsure whether blasting him is a good idea. He screams as if in triumph, or maybe in warning, and jumps from red-hot to white-hot in a heartbeat.

  The boom is so loud the sound alone causes me to reel. The shockwave slams into me a nanosecond later, and for the second time tonight, I crash-land.

  I don’t know how long it takes for the smoke to clear (and I mean that literally), but when it does, I’m left staring at a gaping crevice running the full height of the wall and an empty spot where five inmates should be.

  “Concorde,” I say. I don’t wait for a reply since I doubt I could hear him through the piercing squeal filling my ears. “I need back-up, ASAP. The wall’s been breached.”

  “All units, this is confirmed,” Mindforce reports. “I have a direct visual, there is a breach in the outer perimeter to the southeast.”

  “Mindforce, we’re approximately a half-mile from the breach,” Nina says.

  “Negative. TranzSister is almost here, I’ll send her to back up Lightstorm. I need your team to intercept anyone who tries to make a break for the breach, and it looks like you have a lot of takers coming your way. I count six moving in your direction.”

  “They’re running toward the sound of the massive explosion?” Matt says. “That’s brilliant.”

  “If they were smart people, they wouldn’t be in prison,” Nina says, “now shut up and get ready to rock and roll.”

  They wait. They listen. They scan for hints of movement, their night-vision goggles tinting the forest with an eerie green cast.

  The escapees appear at once, four figures moving at a cautious half-run, their arms outstretched to cushion the blow from any tree that might be so inconsiderate as to jump in their path.

  “Go,” Nina whispers.

  Nina is the first to strike, dropping the lead runner with a leaping kick that knocks him cold, for the present sparing him the searing pain of a dislocated jaw. Matt plants himself in front of the second fugitive, letting him run into a palm-heel strike to the bridge of his nose. The air buzzes and hums, threads of electricity crawling over Megawatt Quantum’s body, and twin lightning bolts jump from her hands with a sharp pop, a miniature thunderclap that drops two more inmates. They twitch spasmodically for a moment, presenting an illusion of consciousness.

  “Yow,” Matt says, awestruck.

  “I know, right?” Megawatt says.

  “Trencher, if you’d do the honors and pull some handcuffs out of that coat of yours,” Nina says.

  “Nina, down!” Megawatt cries out in warning.

  Nina whirls, flames erupting from her hands. Electricity crawls up Megawatt’s fingers like they were miniature Jacob’s Ladders. Neither of them launches an attack, nor do they need to: the Entity appears out of the darkness, a shadow birthing another shadow, to snare the overlooked fifth inmate in a chokehold. The man thrashes violently but briefly. He goes limp. A chunk of jagged rock, intended for the back of Nina’s skull, falls from his hand.

  “You’re welcome,” the Entity says, unceremoniously throwing his captive to the forest floor. “You should be better about watching your back.”

  “So should you,” Missy says.

  The Entity turns to see a small, dark shape crouched at his feet, perched atop another shape clad in a Byrne-issue orange jumpsuit, motionless and silent save for a breathless groan of pain. The girl’s mask seems to grin at the Entity, smug and mocking.

  “And that would make six,” Matt says.

  “Sneaky-sneaky,” Missy says before darting off, melting into the night.

  “I don’t believe it. You just got out-stealthed by a little girl,” Nina says.

  “I did not,” the Entity says.

  “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. Cuff ‘em up, Trencher, double-time. Night’s not over yet.”

  “Repeat that, Mindforce,” Dr. Enigma says, hoping against hope she misheard Mindforce’s last transmission.

  “I said we have a second breach in the outer perimeter, northwestern section, and we have runners getting through.”

  “Dammit!” Concorde spits. “Quantum, I need you over there. Lay down scramblers on anyone getting through.”

  “Roger that, Concorde,” Doc Quantum says.

  “Jeez, we might as well open the front gates at this point,” Kilowatt gripes.

  “Way to think positive, dude,” Stuart says.

  “Just sayin’.”

  “Maybe you should stop saying and start being useful,” Sara says.

  “Second that,” Enigma says, checking her headset. “We have a pair of runners a quarter-mile to our north. Let’s go pick them off before they become a problem.”

  They take off at a jog, tempering the urgency of their mission with the need for stealth. The quartet closes the distance quickly enough, cutting off the inmates mid-flight. The fight ends as quickly as it begins, with Stuart flattening one prisoner with, by his standards, a gentle punch to the stomach, and Sara knocking the other cold with a telekinetic battering ram.

  Kilowatt is the next to fall. He crumples to the ground, stars dancing in his eyes from a stiff elbow to the base of the skull. Dr. Enigma takes a fist to the mouth. Pain spreads across her face in an electric wave, the coppery tang of blood filling her mouth. She staggers from a kick to the belly, falls to her knees, and reels from a boot smashing into the side of her head.

  Stuart charges, bellowing a challenge. His attack is stopped cold by a fist to the sternum that, impossibly, robs him of breath. He stumbles, shock and pain overwhelming him. A snap-kick to the nose finishes the job.

  The King of Pain takes a moment to appreciate his handiwork. He offers Sara a smile and raises a finger to his lips.

  “Shhhh...”

  With that, the King of Pain fades into the night, his chilling farewell floating on the air as a ghostly whisper.

  “See you soon.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  A guard enters the conference room, wheeling in a boxy plastic cart carrying one of those big steel coffee urns and a stack of paper cups, a box of sugar packets, and a plastic canister of that god-awful powdered creamer stuff — but at this point, no one cares it’s not real half-and-half. Everyone is too happy to see caffeine to gripe about something so trivial.

  “Powdered creamer? Blech,” Deuce X. Machine says, making a sour face. Okay, almost everyone.

  “Who cares? Coffee’s coffee,” Nina says, pushing past everyone to pour herself a cup.

  “Could’ve at least brought us some donuts,” Deuce gripes.

  “Deuce, I swear if you don’t shut your damn piehole...”

  “Nina,” Mindforce says. She exhales sharply then takes her coffee into a corner to drink in relative privacy — relative because, except for a few folks getting treated for their injuries over in the medical center, close to every super-hero on the New England HeroNet is in this one room. The atmosphere is tense, but it’s a tension based almost totally in exhaustion. It took us two and a half hours to put down the riot and round up as many prisoners as we could. We didn’t get them all, but we won’t know how bad things really are until Warden Pearce and his crew have finished their head count. God knows how long that will take.

  So, for now, we get to sit in a room slightly too small to hold us all comfortably and drink weak coffee with chalky creamer until...um...

  “What are we waiting for, exactly?” I ask Concorde, who has been unusually broody. “I mean, what are we supposed to do now?”

  “I’ll let you know,” Concorde says.

  Hardly an answer, but it’s the best I’ll get from him.

  I weave my way through the crowd and rejoin the Squad, which has
formed its own little independent state at the far end of the room.

  “What’s going on?” Matt asks.

  “No idea. I don’t think Concorde has any idea either,” I say.

  “Jeez, if Concorde doesn’t have a plan...”

  “We should ask him if we can go home. We’re not doing any good here anyway,” Stuart says, absent-mindedly rubbing his chest.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to head over to the medical center?” I say.

  “I’m good. Stings is all.”

  It’s a brave façade, but a façade is all it is. Stuart’s rarely experienced pain, which means his tolerance for it is pretty low. If he could feel it, stubbing his toe would be ten times worse for him than it would be for anyone else, and that’s not even taking into account the psychological impact. When someone hurts you badly it haunts you, big-time, makes you squirrelly about facing the one who did the damage. I speak from Manticore-based experience on that. Stuart’s used to shrugging off anything anyone throws at him, but now he knows the King of Pain can shut down his invulnerability and —

  “Huh,” I say.

  “What?” Matt says.

  “Does it strike you as weird that the King of Pain was able to negate Stuart’s invulnerability?”

  “But canceling out people’s powers is his thing,” Missy says.

  “Yeah, but no. I get what she’s saying,” Matt says. “Stuart’s invulnerability isn’t a superpower per se; it’s a mutation resulting in an altered cellular structure. Turning off his invulnerability would be like turning off his ridiculous Sasquatch feet.”

  “My feet aren’t that big,” Stuart says. “Hey. Heads up.”

  Stuart nods toward the front of the room as Warden Pearce enters bearing a tablet and a stony expression. Pearce hands the tablet to Concorde. He takes one look at it, and from all the way back here, I can see his neck and shoulders tighten up.

  “Listen up,” he says. The little smatterings of chit-chat die off.

  Here we go.

  “I’m going to get the good news out of the way first because there’s not a lot of it,” Concorde says. “There were no fatalities, not among the responders, the guards, or the inmates, and the injuries were relatively minor all around.”

  He pauses, waiting for any questions. Hearing none, he moves on to the bad news.

  “Out of one hundred thirty-seven confirmed escapees, eighty-four were recovered while still on prison grounds, another dozen were captured off-grounds. That leaves forty-one fugitives on the loose and there are some heavy hitters on that list, including Holocaust Mary, Doctor Skyfall, and the King of Pain.”

  “Are you frigging kidding me?!” Nina says above the outburst of profanity and groans of denial. Sara, I can’t help but notice, is utterly unfazed by the news.

  “I know, I know,” Concorde says. “We’ve already alerted local police in the surrounding communities, as well as the state trooper barracks in Northampton, and I’m tasking most of you to head out now and assist in the search.”

  Concorde starts rattling off names and specific duties, and one super-hero at a time, the room empties out until there’s no one left but the Squad, the Protectorate, and the Quantums.

  “Some of you will be going out in a minute, but first we have to address the heart of the problem,” Concorde says, turning to Pearce. “How the hell did this happen?”

  “We’re still working on that,” Pearce says, hesitating a moment before adding, “but it appears to be an inside job.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Our shift commander apparently sent out a master kill signal to every suppression collar in the facility, then popped every last cell, then locked out the system so no one could reactivate the collars,” Pearce explains. “We have him in the holding area now. I haven’t questioned him yet.”

  “And you’re not going to.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If this was an inside job, we have to assume there were other staffers involved.”

  Pearce glowers down at Concorde. “And I’m under suspicion?”

  “This wasn’t one inmate squeezing through a window and sliding down a rope made of bed sheets. This was a mass-breakout from one of the most secure detention facilities in the country,” Concorde says. “I can’t rule out the possibility of co-conspirators — and if I recall correctly, you’re one of only sixteen people in this facility that knows the system’s master kill codes.”

  Pearce snorts, but he takes the point.

  “Quantum, I want you to take Psyche and talk to the shift commander. I want motives and I want names. Psyche, you catch the slightest whiff of deception from the man, you let Doc Quantum know. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Sara says. She follows Doc Quantum out.

  “It’s possible one of the inmates overheard something,” Mindforce suggests.

  “You can rule out the high-priority prisoners there. They’re always in isolation. They never interact with the other prisoners,” Pearce says.

  Concorde pokes at the tablet. “Not quite,” he says, tilting the screen so Pearce can see it. Pearce furrows his brow and grunts. “Let’s see what else we have. Hm. Looks like half of the Bestiary slipped out, but Minotaur and Kobold were recaptured.”

  “They might be bitter about their teammates leaving them behind,” Nina says. “Bitter enough to flip on them.”

  “My thoughts exactly. All right, Nina, you take Kobold, work him as hard as you have to. Mindforce and I will take Minotaur. Lightstorm and Kunoichi, you’re on interrogation duty.”

  “We are?” I say.

  “I am?” Missy says.

  “You are. I think you might be able to pull some psychological strings on this one,” Concorde says, presenting the tablet to us.

  Oh.

  According to Byrne activity logs, the King of Pain was in the medical center after his suicide attempt, first for immediate treatment, then for a standard twenty-four hour observation period. During that time, three other inmates passed through the medical center. Two of them are now running around loose, but the third is still in Byrne.

  “Come on,” I say to Missy. “Let’s go say hi to Buzzkill Joy.”

  We follow a Byrne guard to the elevator that will take us to the detention level where, we’re told, an old friend is waiting for us to drop in and say hi.

  Like Missy, Buzzkill Joy is the product of a secret government project dubbed Project Moreau. Also like Missy, she possesses strength, speed, and reflexes just short of truly superhuman, enhanced senses, and instead of fingernails she has retractable claws very much like a cat’s.

  That’s where the similarities end. Joy, like several Project Moreau subjects, is psychologically unstable (to put it kindly), while Missy is sweet and cheerful and not at all creepy. Most of the time.

  Now is not one of those times.

  “Are you okay with this, Muppet?” I say.

  “I’m fine,” she says in that unnervingly flat, childlike voice she’s taken to using lately while “in character.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  All righty, then.

  Before the doors can close, a hand covered in black leather stops them, pushes them open.

  “I’m going with you,” the Entity says, joining us in the car.

  “Uh, okay,” I say. “Did Concorde ask you —?”

  “No. But you need me.”

  “We do?”

  “I doubt Buzzkill Joy will be intimidated by two little girls.”

  I stop myself before calling him out on his sexist, ageist crap because, damn him, he’s right; neither Missy nor I are Bad Cop material. Maybe for once the Entity’s creep factor will come in hand.

  Here are some fun facts about Byrne. Each of its three towers is dedicated to a particular security level (minimal, standard, and maximum). Each floor of each tower houses eighteen cells total, which are broken up into three individual clusters of six cells per cluster (which the staff refers to, semi-jokingly,
as neighborhoods). Each neighborhood has its own local control room, which is overseen by a control room for the floor, which is overseen by a control room for the tower, which is overseen by a master control room in the central administrative building. Byrne loves redundancy.

  Normally, there are two armed guards stationed in every single control room, along with a supervisor who is directly responsible for monitoring his or her specific area. The elevator doors slide open to reveal one of the floor-level control rooms, currently staffed by a single armed guard and a woman in an administrative uniform who sports a black eye and a nasty gash down the side of her face, the latter of which is held together by those funny little bandages that look like tiny white butterflies.

  Our escort leads us through the control room and down a hallway to an interrogation room (they call them interview rooms, but I know better). He opens the door and closes it behind us, sealing us in with someone you simply do not want to be sealed in a room with. Buzzkill Joy shoots us a smile dripping with malice, but it’s not the mere sight of her that causes my breath to catch in my throat; it’s the fact she’s sitting in a wheelchair.

  “Hey, cupcake. Long time no see,” Joy says to Missy.

  “Joy,” Missy says.

  “Nice mask.” Joy gives the Entity a cool once-over. “Who’s the gimp?”

  “This is our friend the Entity,” I say. “Say hello, Entity.”

  Predictably, he says nothing. Good man, set the mood right away.

  I sit at the table, fold my hands, and put on my best Good Cop face while the Entity and Missy lurk behind me. “How have you been, Joy?” I say pleasantly.

  “In prison. Duhr.”